The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Nobody is Perfect

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-02-15

"Google notified me that it needs help from a human and then displayed me this image," Jeff K. wrote, "I think I may need some help too."

8 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-15

Getting to YES

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-14

“We’re a dynamic, multi-paradigm organization, and we do most of our new development in a blend of Ruby and Go. We’re not the kind of company that is dogmatic about tools though, we just want to deliver the best product for our customers.”

That’s what Delphia was told in the interview. She didn’t quite grasp why they were mixing those two techs in the first place, but the interview went well, and she took the job. It was then that she discovered that everything she’d been told was technically true.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-15

A Backup Pipeline

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-02-13

“Um… can you come take a look at something for me?”

Pat looked up from happily hacking away at some new features to see Milton hovering at the edge of the cubicle.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-15

A Knotted String

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-12

Rita caught a weird bug. It was weird, in part, because there hadn’t been any code changes in their label printing application for ages. Yet, there was a sudden new bug. Labels were printing with what was obviously unicode garbage. Interestingly, the application definitely supported unicode- there had been a huge effort a few years back to move the C++ code from chars to wchars.

Rita started debugging, and confirmed that when the label text was populated, memory stored correct values. By the time the data was printed, it no longer did. Obviously, there was something wrong with memory management- something was touching the end of the string and throwing off the output. That was an easy enough bug to make in C++, but tracing through 7,000 lines of label printing code to figure out where things got thrown off was more of a chore, especially with the… “friendly” variable naming convention the original developer had used.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-15

The Double Bind Printer

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-11

Printer jams are an unavoidable circumstance. Paper might not seem sticky, but static electricity and humidity can to horrible things, and all the protections in the world can't stop them. Printers are also objectively terrible, and always have been.

Years ago, when Coyne T was a fresh-faced youth, he supported an aging COBOL-based warehouse system. Their reports went to a noisy continuous feed line printer. The printer was a finicky beast, and no matter what sacrifices were made before printing, it had a tendency to devour pages, or have the gears slip and misprint lines. Because the report data came straight from a COBOL job, there was no cached output to reprint- the entire reporting process would need to be re-run every time the printer got angry.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-14

Quite Powerful Errors Indeed

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-02-08

"I was considering this recorder for my son, but I think 120W might be a bit over the top," writes Peter B.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-14

A Policy Exception

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-07

“So, we have a problem. A… a big one.”

Andrea C worked for an insurance company. In terms of software development, a “problem” meant she’d misfiled one of her TPS coversheets or something like that. A big problem meant she’d accidentally checked in code that contained a comment with some profanity in it.

31 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-08

Double Up

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-06

Carl works in research, and like most research organizations, half their code is carelessly glued together GUI tools, command line interfaces, and shell scripts. The other half, the half which does the real work, is Fortran. Sure, the code was written forty years ago, but the laws of physics haven’t changed, so it’s still good and it’s still fast.

Carl usually doesn’t have to touch the Fortran half. Instead, he usually looks at the other bit. Most things are run from shell scripts, and most of the work of the shell scripts is getting environment variables configured so that they Fotran code can actually run its model without having a heart attack.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-08

Set the Flux Capacitor for 12/30/1899

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2019-02-05

I mentally think of the early 2000s as "the XML Age". XML was everywhere. Everyone wanted to put XML into their applications. Java was the XML king, using XML for everything. People were starting to ask themselves, "do we need the big expensive RDBMS, when we can just use XML instead?"

In other words, just like JSON today, but worse. Tomislav A inherited one such database- a clunky pile of XML documents with only the vaguest hint of a schema to them, and a mix of valuable, useful data, and a mountain of crap. With the assumption that all data validation was happening in the application layer, the database was mostly "garbage in, garbage sits there forever and can never be deleted because it might be important".

45 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-11

Collect Your Garbage Test

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2019-02-04

Alex L works for a company with a bunch of data warehousing tools. One of the primary drivers for new features is adding bits which make the sales demos shinier, or in marketing speak, "delivers a value add for a prospective customer".

One of those "shinies" was a lightweight server which would gather stats from the data warehousing engine and provide a dashboard with those stats, and notifications about them. Prospective customers really love it when the machine goes "bing" and shows them an interesting notification.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-06

Please Select All Errors that Apply

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2019-02-01

"It doesn't impact me, but just wondering...which one would I pick if my spouse was named Elisabeth?" wrote Jon T.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-07

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